"...here are my three favorite summer reads. Top of the list is performance artist damali ayo's How to Rent a Negro, just out from Lawrence Hill Books. It's a very funny expansion of the concept explored on her popular website, rent-a-negro.com--witty, empathetic, unsettling, hilarious. A kind of Miss Manners for the racially isolated yet yearning to connect."
- Patricia J. Williams
BOOKSandWORDS.com
BEST BOOK OF SUMMER 2005
How to Rent a Negro
Build a Thriving Business
As a Professional ‘Black Person’ --
Boost Your Reputation by Showing Off a ‘Black Friend’
By damali ayo
A truly hysterical and insightful book of ‘new school’ Black satire and social commentary springs from ‘old school’ Black humor. Author and performance artist damali ayo taps the consciousness and funny bone of Black and White relations with a handbook for transacting business from awkward ethnic questions and situations. How to Rent a Negro is the rare book where everyone gets the clever message, and will be seriously enlightened and inspired through laughter. Satirists Godfrey Cambridge to Dave Chappelle, and intellects Bertice Berry to Cornel West would be proud. A funny must-have manual for the millennium of ‘diversity.’
- Dennis Moore
How To Rent A Negro
by damali ayo
Lawrence Hill Books, $14.95
As the good folks at The Daily Show have made clear, the best satire is transparent, sitting back and letting the absurdities of its subject do the talking. Which is why conceptual artist damali ayo’s How To Rent A Negro, an offshoot of her rent-a-negro.com web site, is so successful. Its sly concept—that it’s illegal to actually own another person, but renting is perfectly okay—works on a couple of levels, damning tokenism while also pointing out how little has actually changed in the arena of race relations.
And while this could come off strident, ayo’s straightfaced style helps bring the comedy off—the book’s laid out in a perfect deadpan of a corporate guidebook, with careful, PC management-speak directed towards both renters (“Why not take the only black employee out to lunch?”) and rentals (“Avoid asking your renter about the secrets to their financial success …. There are some things renters just don’t want to share”), and hilarious price and invoicing guides for services like “The Hair Grab,” “The Blame Game” and, of course, the valuable “Tell Them I’m Not A Racist” voucher. Uncomfortable? Sure. But How To Rent a Negro is also funny, biting and valuable.
—Matt Konrad
"Damali Ayo's scathing, satirical website, rent-a-negro.com, has been spun into a must-read book that gleefully blows past the boundaries of tentative talk on current race relations into cringe-inducing, too-close-for-comfort commentary. Often hilarious, mostly disturbing, always shocking, this book is a riveting sociological study that will have you questioning your own "race-dar" from the first page. Ayo tackles the prickly concept of "casual" racism perpetuated predominately by whites towards blacks in an unsettling way.
This relentlessly cheerful book advises whites on how to "rent" the services of black people in order to make themselves appear more cultured, concerned, and empathetic. Ayo also lays out guidelines for blacks who may wish to be "rented" and encourages them, with clever ready-made "invoices," to "bill" whenever they are expected by whites to answer for their entire race. The forms themselves are works of art; Ayo even includes a handy "race card" to be played. Its bleak observations about racial insensitivity are so depressingly accurate.
Worth the price of the book alone has to be "Dear Rent-A-Negro," with unexpurgated letters to Ayo's website. Ayo calls herself and "honest manipulator," and her pseudo-guidebook underscores this by fully exploring inherent racism and its ugliness in a way that will challenge every reader."
– BUST Magazine
"What's exciting about the title to me," [ayo] told talk show host Bill O'Reilly recently, "is that I use the word 'negro' very deliberately. That's because the kinds of behaviors we're talking about in the book should be outdated, just as the word negro."
Of course, you really can't rent a negro, the 33-year-old artist told me. This is the author's attempt at satire, and ayo's way of saying: "I wanted to be treated as a person. I mean, don't you?"
Bottom line: She doesn't really need the money, especially if the book does well in sales. What damali ayo really wants is to get people thinking and talking.
Talking about race.
I can tell you this, it got conversations going in our newsroom.
-John Sharify, KOMO TV news, seattle
"A rare and fantastic and necessary book. And a great pleasure to read!"
"Take notes if you need to."
"Funniest and most helpful book I've read on black-white racial interactions in the USA.....Must reading for all Americans. Could well be the "Little Black Book" that finally starts the honest dialog black and white Americans must begin in order to make us all whole again"
"Sadly I have rented my share of people. I have...done a great deal of the things in this book. It is fun to laugh at oneself and still learn from it.
A slap in my face and a healthy knock from my hypersensitive liberal high horse."
"Read it and start thinking about how you can make some extra money as a beautiful black person."
"I bought this because it looked funny, irreverent and possibly a bit discomforting to liberal readers (of which I am one.) It is all these things."
"As a 37- year old black female, the book rings true to my racial experiences in this country. How many times can a white person ask me about my hair, skin color and what it is like to be with a black man. How many times has a white person told me with amazement that I am polite, pretty, articulate and well traveled. ... "How to Rent a Negro" brings to light these racial issues and questions."
"Do we treat our colleagues and friends differently if they are a different race? How much has the country learned and grown since the days of slavery? Why does everyone feel the need to touch long dreadlocks? "How to Rent a Negro" is a book that can help us with these questions, all while laughing so hard we want to pee our pants."
- amazon.com customer reviews
"Ayo's book teases out the foibles of racial dissonance with penetrating subtlety. And by introducing the mock notion that being the token black at a party - or validating whites' self-congratulatory ideas about not being racist - can be a billable service provided by a qualified professional contractor, "How to Rent a Negro" has wonderful fun with the whole mess.
The genius of this premise, however, is that it frames everything in the setting of mainstream business culture, making everyone look a tad absurd.
All in all, this is more than a clever book by a more-than-talented young voice."
- Jake Spatz full article .pdf
